How to teach company employees (beginner teacher)

Hey guys,

I have been at my mid-sized manufacturing company for a couple years doing translation work among other excel data input tasks.

My company is giving me the opportunity to conduct 30 minute classes, three times a week at my office.

My English is fluent, and Korean is about 80% I would say.

I recently took online courses for the TESOL certificate and just received it. I don't think the program really prepared me much for my lessons but gave me that certificate to show some credibility to the students.

How would you begin a lesson plan? Should I focus on "Business English" only?

WIth zero experience, I would truly appreciate any advice on where to begin.

I am nervous as if my job depends on it. Thank you for any info!

 

Do you know what level your 'students' will be? If they are company employees some of them may have a pretty good grasp of English already. If that's the case you could just have conversation classes (choose a topic and prepare some basic discussion points). It will be easy to have a conversation for 30 minutes. You can look up 'conversation starters' online to get you started.

If you have lower level learners, a textbook or workbook of some kind would be ideal. Your workplace may be willing to provide you with one. I also teach the faculty at my current workplace and we have a simple Adult ESL textbook that we work through (which I supplement with games and activities to make it more interesting).

If it's not possible to use a textbook, building vocabulary and basic sentence structure (grammar) might be the best way to get started. You could prepare some flashcards and basic conversation templates.

As far as 'Business English' goes, you may need to ask your company directly. I assume they would like their employees to have a fairly decent grasp of the appropriate language for their job. That being said, if you have people starting with a low level of English ability it's more important to build up their vocabulary and basic conversation skills.

I hope everything goes well for you!

I would start out with a clear plan of what the company or students want. If it is simply to pass an English test to get a promotion, I would find a corresponding textbook and teach from that. Often, companies have certain requirements that their employees need to pass in order to get a raise or a promotion.

If it is general "business english" then you can pick up any textbook you want and go from there. Ideally, you would want to balance things off with some basics in effective communication as well. Typically, for lower level learners, I start off with some general free talking and then get into the books. I often discuss a lot of the questions with the student and get them speaking a lot more. Then we would jump into some topic-based discussion that is related to what we have just learned. However, if the student is really struggling, I would just continue with the book.

Most of my students can handle themselves fairly well in English. So most of my lessons are centred around discussion, communication and conversation. These students are looking for ways to improve their English and have typically done every test imaginable. So I mainly coach them on their pronunciation and word usage and/or sentence structure.

These higher level classes do have a textbook but often it gets pushed aside if the discussion is going well. If they have certain criteria that they have to improve, I will tailor the class to help them. Sometimes that means helping them improve their presentation skills or proofing some documents and explaining how to make it clearer for the recipient.